The POSSE approach to your online presence

In 2019 I explained how I was going to decentralise my online presence by cross-posting all my really interesting content to both social media and this blog. Since then I’ve posted all my content here first, and then shared snippets of that everywhere else.

This is not a new idea, of course, and I’ve been preaching variations of this owned-media-first approach for years at the places I’ve worked.

Screenshot of a flow chart from a slide deck. The flowchart shows stories pitched by Jetstar to the media with a wide arrow. A much narrower arrow goes from the media to the audience. Parallel to this is a wide, darker coloured arrow showing stories written on our own platforms. An identically-wide arrow goes from there to the audience, along with a smaller arrow showing stories on our own platforms being picked up by the media.

However this week, thanks to Molly White’s [citation needed] newsletter, I discovered that the phrase that’s been used to describe this approach since 2012 is POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

I thought I’d note that here and share a few interesting and relevant POSSE-related links:

  • The first item in the ‘Worth a read’ section of [citation needed] ‘Issue 69 – Nice’ (2 Nov 2024) is Molly White’s most recent mention of POSSE.

  • She talked about this approach in more detail in an earlier edition of her newsletter: ‘POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world’ (27 Sep 2024).

  • Cory Doctorow is someone who follows the POSSE approach and in his most recent Pluralistic newsletter instalment, ‘Bluesky and enshittification’ (2 Nov 2024), he talks about why he isn’t joining Bluesky.

  • Here are the IndieWeb wiki articles on ‘POSSE’ and ‘PESOS’ (Publish Everywhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site.

  • Finally, David Pierce wrote a good article in The Verge about POSSE that is worth reading: ‘The poster’s guide to the internet of the future’ (24 Oct 2023).

Close-up photo showing a person typing on a laptop. (@Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash)

Syndicate or post natively?

The one aspect of POSSE I don’t do is the automatic syndication my content to other channels.

While I love using RSS to read content from lots of different sources, I don’t like doing the opposite: using a tool to automatically write content to lots of different sources.

I did use IFFT back in the day to automatically post my Flickr photos to Instagram and Twitter, but I don’t do that anymore.

I enjoy posting natively on the channels I use and, in turn, seeing what everyone else is posting there.

The only automation that comes in handy is Buffer, and that’s to schedule photo posts to Mastodon and Bluesky in the middle of the day when my desktop computer (where all my mirrorless camera photos are saved) is turned off.

It’s not easy, but it’s worth it

If you’re someone who wants more ownership of the content you’re putting into various social media walled gardens, I recommend you check out the POSSE approach and join us in a more decentralised web.

Semantic arguments as a last line of defence

Recently I’ve seen people in various online platforms insist that what Israel has been doing in Palestine isn’t apartheid and that what they’re doing now isn’t genocide.

My initial reaction was to think, “how fortunate you are that you can discuss semantics like this from a distance”.

But mostly it reminded me of when the American media refused to name domestic terrorism as ‘terrorism’. Or when they called terrorism that happened in their country ‘terror’ instead.

What they were really saying, of course, is that terrorism is what non-white people do in foreign countries. Stuff like that isn’t done by white people, and it’s certainly not done in our country.

It also reminded me of when people say things like, “Oh he can’t be the one who committed the sexually assault. He’s a victim of sexual assault; he would never do that to anyone else.”

They’re clinging so hard to their beliefs that they have to fall back to semantics to defend their positions.

At no time can they see the reality that:

  • Some white people can and do commit terrorism.

  • There is terrorism in countries with predominantly white populations.

  • Some sexual assault survivors can and do commit sexual assault.

  • Some Jews can and do commit genocide.

But why?

The reason they dig their heels in is pretty obvious. It’s the same reason people insist on sayings things like “not all men”.

Because if they acknowledge that, yes, all men do benefit from patriarchal set-ups, then they might actually have to do something about it.

Or, more likely, they’ll lose the moral wiggle room to do nothing (or the bare minimum) about it. When they’re one of the good guys – one of the #NotAllMen – then they don’t have to do anything more, right?

Similarly, if these people are forced to acknowledge that Israel is an apartheid state that currently is committing genocide against the Palestinians, then they lose the ability to say things like, “what Israel is doing is horrible, of course, but they do have the right to defend themselves.”

Because right now what they’re really saying is, “I can excuse the mass casualties of civilians, but I draw the line at genocide.”

Two-frame screen grab from the television show ‘Community’ in which a white female character says, “I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty.” To which a black female character replies, “You can excuse racism?!”

An aside about a theory

Which then reminds me of one of the theories about why Hamas attacked Israel in the way that they did.

You know when a child keeps needling their sibling till the sibling overreacts? And how parents often shout at the sibling for the overreaction and not at the first child for the initial provocation? That’s possibly one of the reasons Hamas carried out their most recent attacks.

The theory is that they wanted Israel to overreact to such an extent that the world had no choice but to acknowledge Israel’s ongoing, escalating war crimes (along with their continued crimes against humanity).

Of course Hamas did this without the consent of the people of Gaza and at the cost of thousands of Palestinian civilians, many of them children…but that’s a whole other issue.

On a lighter note…

To leave on a lighter note, because I live on the internet, when I see someone digging their heels in about not using the words ‘apartheid’ or ‘genocide’, this meme is the first thing that comes to mind :)

  • It’s only apartheid if it’s from the Apartheid region of South Africa, otherwise it’s sparkling institutionalised (racial) segregation.

  • It’s only genocide if it’s from the Genocide region of Poland, otherwise it’s sparkling intentional destruction of a people (in whole or in part).

Strike another one off the list

When you stop supporting your community, your community stops supporting you.

I pay for my favourite social media sites (#privileged) but I now only pay for Tumblr, having cancelled my Twitter subscription earlier (we all know why) and now Reddit.

Screenshot of a pop-up window on a website asking to confirm that the user wants to cancel their (Reddit) Premium subscription.

I fully support platforms working to build multiple revenue streams, by the way, which is why I pay for them in the first place.

Heck, I’ve been paying for Reddit Premium since 2016!

Screenshot of a Reddit ‘trophy case’ box showing four trophies: Ten-Year Club, Gilding V, Verified Email, and Reddit Premium (since July 2016)

But there are ways to charge for usage and then there are ways to charge for usage.

That’s enshittification for you, right? *sigh*

I guess over the next few months we’ll see just how far along the “…and find out” stage we’re at for Reddit.

My lost years on Instagram

I’m not a fan of tightly gated internet communities. By ‘tightly gated’ I mean communities (ie social networks) that don’t provide public RSS feeds and also don’t let you view anyone’s content without being logged in yourself.

Instagram is one such gated community.

All my photos used to be publicly accessible

Before 2007 I didn’t publicly share many photos online. Those that I did, I uploaded as albums to this website – like my engagement and wedding photos.

Then in 2007 I joined Flickr and started posting all my photos there. Flickr was an excellent site, and I even had a paid account for several years.

My Flickr photostream from 2007

Instagram launched its Android app in April 2012, so a few months later I started posting photos there as well. During this period I cross-posted all my photos to both Instagram and Flickr.

Flickr stagnated, Instagram innovated

Unfortunately, Yahoo! pretty much stopped investing in Flickr. So, while Instagram was becoming increasingly easier and more fun to use, Flickr stayed where it was.

That’s why from 2017 I stopped cross-posting, and instead posted all my photos to Instagram only.

My Instagram photos from 2017

Facebook locked down Instagram

In the earlier days of Instagram you could still browse someone’s profile and look through all their photos without needing an Instagram account yourself. But, over time, Facebook made Instagram an increasingly tighter gated community.

Recognising this was happening, from the start of 2019 I started cross posting all my photos to this blog. That’s where we are now.

Diagram showing four timelines. Three of these are light grey in colour and are labeled ‘Flickr’ (2 Mar 2007 to 7 May 2017), ‘Instagram’ (8 Nov 2012 to 9 Apr 2019), and ‘Random tangent blog’ (1 Jan 2019 to now). One is orange in colour and is labeled ‘Instagram only’ (2017-2019).

Unlocking two years of ‘lost’ photos

What all this means is that I have almost two years’ worth of photos locked inside Instagram’s walled garden. This is what I’m now here to fix.

Over the next four posts I’ll re-share all my Instagram photos from 2017 and 2018 that are currently only available on that platform.

Here goes…

Humans love telling stories

Tom Eastman posted this back in 2018:

Screenshot of a tweet from Tom Eastman posted on 4 December 2018 that reads “I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four”.

He’s not wrong, and I get the point he’s trying to make: the internet is full of walled gardens and, by design, it’s difficult to talk across the boundaries.

But a few thousand years ago this could’ve been someone complaining that their valley is a group of five villages, each consisting of people telling stories they heard in the other four.

So while, yes, it is shitty that there isn’t more interoperability across social networks, I think it’s beautiful that humans love sharing stories they’ve seen and heard elsewhere with their own tribes — and that we’ll continue to do so, no matter what walls people build around us for their own financial benefit.

Year in review 2021

Every January I do a review of where I spent my time, money, and attention in the year just ended. This lets me add or remove subscriptions, memberships, recurring payments, and social media follows. It also lets me see if I have any biases or blind spots, or if I’m unknowingly stuck in any kind of echo chamber.

This year I’ve decided to document and share some of my 2021 review.

Podcasts

I subscribed to 41 podcasts in 2021:

  • I listened to every single episode of 83% of them

  • 46% of them I supported financially in one way or another (eg memberships, recurring Patreon support, digital subscriptions, one-off donations)

  • Women and non-binary people hosted 54% of the podcasts I listened to

  • I mostly listened to technology podcasts (eg This Week in Tech, Security Now, Rocket, Command Line Heroes, Darknet Diaries)

People

I directly supported 12 people through recurring payments in 2021:

  • Most of these people are YouTubers (or at least started on that platform)

  • 67% of them identified as female or non-binary

News and information

I paid for eight news and information sources (through recurring subscriptions):

  1. The Guardian

  2. The Conversation

  3. Wired

  4. Quartz

  5. The Sizzle newsletter

  6. CHOICE magazine

  7. Offscreen magazine

  8. Hodinkee magazine

Given that list, it makes sense that Blindspotter thinks my media diet:

  • leans left + centre (with the Conversation, the Guardian, and ABC Australia as my top 3 news sources) and

  • is somewhat narrow (since its sourced mostly from independently owned sources).

(This analysis was based off 53 of my most recent tweets that contained a link to a news article, by the way, so take it with a grain of salt.)

Do I want to engage more with media sources that lean to the right or are owned by large media conglomerates? Not really. Which means I’m quite happy with my current media balance.

My current media diet matches the latest ABC Vote Compass analysis of my political leanings (from the 2019 Australian Federal election) which puts me somewhere between the Greens and the Australian Labor Party. So that checks out.

Subscriptions and donations

I like getting and using things for free, but I pay for what’s important to me and what I can afford at the time.

So over 2021:

Twitter

The social network I participate in the most is Twitter.

Over 2021:

  • I posted 1,010 tweets, 33% of which were replies

  • I tweeted the most in June and August (131 and 139 tweets in those months, respectively)

  • On average my tweets get 198 impressions, and 5.8% of people who see my tweets engage with them (like, reply, retweet, etc)

  • My most popular tweet in 2021 got 45,237 impressions

  • My most engaging tweets in 2021 (of which there were a few) got 33.3% engagement

Overall, I’m happy with how much energy I put into Twitter and how much engagement I have with the people on this social network.

Over the year I also used tools like (the free versions of) Followerwonk and followerAudit to analyse my Twitter graph, which told me interesting things like:

  • I follow more female users (29%) than male users (22%) – though this tool only estimates within the gender binary

  • That said, gender isn’t relevant to most (49%) of the Twitter users I follow (eg they’re not personal accounts)

  • 5.6% of my followers are estimated to be fake, which is lower than the 7% world average

  • 92% of the people I follow have been on Twitter for more than 5 years (I myself have been on Twitter for more than 13 years)

Finally, to get the most out of Twitter, I did these things:

  • I followed really good users and several interesting topics

  • I maintained a bunch of lists to keep my main feed from being overrun by stuff I didn’t want to see all the time (and then I used TweetDeck to track what’s been said by users in those lists)

  • I audited the users I follow, and then did at least two bulk unfollows last year

You have to put in the work if you want to have a good experience on your social network of choice. That’s what I did with Twitter, and that’s why it continues to be one of my favourite places to hang out.

(FYI. Most of the rest of my online energy goes into YouTube, Reddit, tumblr, and the broader decentralised, RSS-based web via NewsBlur.)

Where to from here?

I did do more analysis than this, but I’m not going talk about it all here.

Though maybe I should mention that the ‘Wedding song lyrics’ page on this website continues to be the most popular page year after year. I’m glad I refreshed it a few months ago, correcting some lyrics and adding audio references for all the songs I’ve catalogued there.

What I’ll do now is spend the next few days unfollowing and unsubscribing on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, NewsBlur, and email. That should be fun, and it’ll help get 2022 off to a good start.

I intend to have a fantastic 2022 and I trust you do too. I hope this year exceeds all your expectations and that you have a truly fantabulous time!

Log in alerts FTW

Log in alerts are such a useful feature. It’s eye-opening to see just how frequently people try to break into your accounts!

Alerts like these also drive home the importance of using two-factor authentication. I have that turned on everywhere. Seriously, you should too.

Screenshot of an email from Instagram that reads “Sorry to hear you’re having trouble logging into Instagram. We can help you get straight back into your account.” and then a button that says “Log in as ameelkhan”. Below that is text that reads “You can also reset your Instagram password”.

Instagram also offers an incredibly useful additional security feature: a list of emails they’ve sent you in the last 14 days.

Malicious actors can send fake log in alerts that are actually phishing emails. You can check this sent-email list in your account settings to verify if the email you’ve just received is real or not.

Screenshot from the Instagram website. The page’s title is ‘Emails from Instagram’. The text below this reads: “Security and login emails from Instagram in the last 14 days will appear here. You can use it to verify which emails are real and which are fake.” Below that is a list of emails, all with the subject “ameelkhan, we’ve made it easy to get back on Instagram”. Each item on this email list also has a timestamp so you can tell when it was sent.

14 year blogging anniversary

It has been fourteen years since I wrote my first ‘technical’ blog post.

I say technical because I was posting occasional life updates on my personal website before then, but this was the first time I installed blogging software on my site and posted something through there.

An email from Fantastico alerting me that an instance of WordPress has been installed on my website.

Blogs are the best because you’re the boss

Blogs – and personal websites in general – really are the best.

Social networks, micro-blogs, and photo/video hosting sites are fine and all. But on all of those you’re at the mercy of the platform. The folks who run that platform (or the AI that moderates it) can delete your profile and your entire content history if they want to. And you can’t take all your content and migrate it to some other platform either. You’re always stuck inside their walled garden and they control what it is that you can and can’t do there.

On your blog (or website) your content is always yours. You can do whatever you want with it. You do have to manage the site itself, but these days even a minimally skilled user of the internet won’t find that particularly challenging. And, sure, more functional and nicer looking blogs will cost a little, but running a basic, decent looking site isn’t as expensive as you’d think.

Blogs aren’t what they used to be though

Of course the content of my blog has changed drastically since 24 April 2007. Back then I talked a lot more about random things going on in my life (hence the name ‘random tangent’), the things I liked and didn’t like, the movies I’d watched and music I’d listened to, and what my current interests were.

Most of those topics don’t warrant full blog posts anymore. A couple of photos and 2-3 tweets usually do the trick for me. Often just a simple retweet or quote tweet is pretty much all I want to say on a topic I’m not actively involved in. Also, with a retweet I can share other people’s point of view, not just my own.

What goes on my blog these days are the things I want to remember, process, and revisit in the future. Things I don’t want disappearing into the social media black hole that are then difficult to find later on. Things that, for one reason or another, matter.

So here we are, and here’s to another fourteen years.

Decentralizing my online presence

Starting this year, I'm going to cross-post to my blogs:

  • everything I post on Instagram and

  • most of what I tweet (and retweet) on Twitter.

Why?

Two reasons.

1. I'm sick of the walled gardens that social networks force you play in.

It’s great that I can post stuff so easily to social networks. That’s where most my non-techie friends and family members are too – which is super cool.

But, once I do post stuff to a social network, there’s almost nothing else I can do with this content of mine. I can’t archive, index, search, tag, export, or repurpose any of it. And I certainly can’t share it to any other social network. So, once my content is in there, it stays in there.

That’s not the way things used to be, back when the web was more decentralized.

In the words of Tom Eastman: “I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”

Now I’m still a massive RSS user (yay NewsBlur!) so, for me, most of the web still is decentralized. I want my content to be part of this easily accessible, decentralized web as well.

Which brings me to reason number two…

2. Social networks are internet black holes.

If a post of mine isn’t in currently your social news feed or isn’t pinned to the top of my social profile, it might as well not exist.

Unless you’re willing to go to my profile and scroll through years of posts, there’s no easy way to see what I’ve posted since I joined Flickr in 2007, Facebook in 2007, Twitter in 2008, and Instagram in 2012.

None of my social network posts appear in Google or Bing, either. So, as far as the broader internet is concerned, this content of mine has disappeared into a black hole that you need to be a member of to access. And, even then, there’s no easy way to find what I’ve posted there over the years. (Though, to be fair, Flickr and Twitter do have fairly decent built-in search engines.)

I don’t want my content to be this thoroughly inaccessible.

So what next?

Initially, not too much is going to change. I’ll still keep posting regularly to Twitter and Instagram.

But, because I’ll be cross-posting most of my stuff to my blogs, too, you’ll be able to go to my blogs (this one and my professional one) and look through all the great stuff (mine and others’) that I’ve been sharing on Twitter and Instagram.

The best part: this blog content will be archived, tagged, and backed-up. And it’ll be easy to search for, export, and share to any other social network.

Yay for a more (re)decentralized web!